After 30 years of breakneck economic growth, clean-up time appears to have arrived for China as it attempts to shift to a greener and more energy-efficient development model.
"We are very happy that development has been so fast, but we worry about living so fast. Everything has two sides," said Song Yuyan, director of the Eco Center at Tianjin Economic-Technological Development Area (TEDA), a vast government-backed industrial park, home to 15,000 manufacturers and located between Tianjin city and the Bohai Sea in Northeastern China.
Areas such as TEDA were set up decades ago to kickstart China's industrial development and are now at the forefront of attempts to clean it up. The park has its own government in a bid to cut red tape and attract big international companies and the TEDA administration set up Song's Eco Center in 2009 to help companies become more efficient and discharge less waste.
The stakes could not be higher.
"China is getting much more serious about the environment. If industry is not energy efficient it's costly for economic growth because you have to import more oil and burn more coal," said Tom Miller, managing director of the Dragonomics research firm.
But changing corporate culture in China, which observers say can be wasteful and inefficient, is a tough job.
"It is so difficult," said Song. "An eco-industry park is a network. One company's waste can be used by another company. We worry about how to achieve it because in TEDA we have so many companies from different countries and cultures and it's very difficult for them to communicate. They do things independently and just discharge their waste."
The Eco Center holds matchmaking events to introduce manufacturers to recycling and energy efficiency companies and also seeks out international cooperation to bring the latest in Japanese and European green expertise to Tianjin.
One such project is industrial symbiosis (IS), a scheme under which companies get together to find out whether their waste might be useful to another company's industrial process. Funded by the EU's Switch Asia project, the Chinese government and the UK government's environment department, the four-year project in TEDA is the first IS project in Asia, according to Richard Mensah, an international project assistant with International Synergies, which promotes IS around the world.
But IS initially met with resistance, Song said.
"In the first year we found it hard to do the synergies," she said. "Companies were happy to participate in workshops but they didn't want to reveal the quantities of waste they generated. Some companies didn't think they had a responsibility to recycle their waste better than before."
Many of the Chinese companies were also not used to talking with each other, Mensah said.
"In the UK we sit businesses around tables for them to talk to one another and explore opportunities," he said. "Here it's not easy for businesses to start talking to each other and review things so we had to adapt the format. Discussion between the businesses is still not really happening but we collect the information, find the opportunities and go to the businesses with them rather than making the matches during the workshops."
IS has been running in TEDA for two years, during which time there has been "huge improvement," Mensah said. The project has 650 members and has achieved 38 synergies that have reduced costs by RMB 12 million (US$1.9 million), led to additional sales of RMB 90 million (US$ 14.2 million), avoided the emission of 32,000 tonnes of CO2, diverted 157,000 tonnes of waste away from landfill sites, found a use for 318 tonnes of hazardous waste, avoided the need for the consumption of 772,000 tonnes of new raw materials and saved 300,000 tonnes of water.
In one example of IS, food processing company Cargill was able to provide its nutrient-rich industrial effluent to New Water Source Treatment Plant, a sludge treatment company, which needed nutrients in its water feed to give the biological organisms what they needed to break down the sludge.
IS in TEDA has attracted investors such as recycling company Foqiang, which will open a recycling plant in TEDA in July that will be able to handle 40,000 tonnes of waste per year. It is also spreading into Tianjin City, where it is now part of the city's five-year-plan.
"The green culture at TEDA is very strong and we are particularly impressed by IS," said Wang Zhimin, Foqiang's vice general manager. "In general in China, environmental awareness is improving. The quantity of waste is only going to increase and so there is rich potential."
Although the concept of a 'circular economy' involving recycling is part of Chinese government strategy, lax regulations mean there is little incentive for companies to take action, Song said. Whereas in the UK there is high landfill tax of US$120 per tonne of waste buried, in China the fee is 60 yuan (less than US$10) per tonne, reducing companies' incentive to treat waste.
Recycling is also fragmented, Song said. A multitude of small companies and individuals collect and sort waste but they don't follow any defined standards and simply look for what they can sell. To increase Chinese recycling companies' awareness of the latest techniques, TEDA Environmental Protection Bureau has set up a pilot project for general industrial waste management in cooperation with Japan's Ibaraki prefecture, involving 30 companies. TEDA Eco Center last year organised a visit by 15 green companies from Japan to share expertise.
The TEDA government makes an annual grant of 100 million yuan (US$16 million) available to companies to fund about 30 percent of their investment in energy efficiency, but only about half of it is distributed because companies are unwilling to put up their own money, Song said.
However, this may be because many executives simply aren't aware of the opportunities presented by energy efficiency, recycling and other synergies. TEDA Eco Center has set up an online database detailing such opportunities and has also carried out detailed surveys of hundreds of companies to find out what they need. The Eco Center's matchmaking events, which Song said were its primary activity, deal with very specific areas. And interest is growing, she added.
TEDA is also doing its best to tackle other issues. Northern China as a whole suffers a chronic shortage of water. TEDA's water recycling system recycles 30,000 tonnes of the total 80,000 tonnes used by companies, piping 10,000 tonnes back to them and using the rest for landscaping.
Tianjin will be one of seven pilot cities taking part in China's CO2 emissions trading scheme, due to launch before 2015. French experts have already visited TEDA to help companies carry out CO2 audits.
"We want enterprises to prepare for that because they will face very high requirements," Song said. "They should know how to calculate CO2 and should think of low emissions as a capital asset that can be traded in the future. We can help them by making international methodology available."
